You can’t know exactly how much traffic a competitor has on its site, but some services such as Compete.com (Figure 16-2) provide rough estimates.

Figure 16-2. Comparison of estimated traffic on Compete.com

As we’ve seen, traffic to a site is no guarantee of outcomes: you may have a competitor with far less traffic than yourself—but with a much higher conversion rate—who’s making far more money online. Without knowing what others’ conversion rates are like, there’s no way to know exactly how well their businesses are running. Traffic volumes are merely a starting point.

There is, however, a way to determine how well you’re doing against your competitors in general: benchmarking in Google Analytics (Figure 16-3).

Figure 16-3. The Benchmarking function of Google Analytics compares key traffic metrics to similarly sized sites in your industry

To use Google Benchmarking, you first specify the business category you’re in. Google Analytics will then show you how you compare to others in that category in terms of page views, retention, and so on.

You can multiply estimates of competitors’ traffic (from Compete.com and others) by the Google Analytics benchmarks for a category as shown above, and get a “best guess” of what your competitors are experiencing. Be aware, however, that this is only a guess: bounce rate, conversion, time on site, and so on will vary widely across websites. This kind of analysis also won’t bring you closer to conversion or goal attainment, since Google Analytics’ Benchmarking doesn’t share this data, and conversion goals vary widely from site to site depending on how analytics are configured.